P3I: the Delaware programmability, productivity and proficiency inquiry

New advancements on high-productivity computing systems have shown the weaknesses of existing parallel programming models and languages. To address such weaknesses, a number of researchers have proposed new parallel programming models and powerful programming language features that can meet the challenges of the emerging HPC Systems. However, the success or the failure of a new programming model and accompanied language features need to be evaluated in the context of their productivity impacts. In this paper, we report a productivity study that was conducted at the University of Delaware in the context of the IBM PERCS project, being funded via the DARPA/HPCS enterprise. In particular, our study is centered on the productivity impact of a new and key programming construct called Atomic Sections that is jointly proposed by our group and our colleagues at IBM.